- Rest in Peace, Neil Innes
- Our sociopath overlords
- Our sociopath overlords
- Hardest year of my life, 2019, nothing I will write about here
- with the 2020 world certain to make 2019 world seem cake I'm hopeful real life 2020 easier than real life 2019 so I know if my anger at what I do write about here is purer, freer, or not
- I fear that it will be, I fear that it won't
- Reminder: cops
- Reminder: cops
- Lies, damned lies, and recycling
- The Apparatus
- I'm surveilled, I type into my free blogging platform
- The cruelest way
- Ten very MOCO things of the decade
- The most scathing book reviews of 2019
- Gábor Urbán's apocalyptic art
- A not mine bleggalgaze
- Patti Smith 73 yesterday, Paul Westerberg 60 today
WATCHING THE COMPLEX TRAIN-TRACK CHANGES
Bernadette Mayer
You put on an ornate ballgown
You say “someone has to do it”
You take me to where you work,
The inside of a pyramid with chasms,
Watching the complex train-track changes
Products and objects make love to my father
Two babies are born—Bruno and Daisy
You take your shirt off looking boylike & lovely
You get on the plane, both clown & wizard
And then get off in a comedy of manners
Our dates become a comedy of dinners
Your name rhymes with clothes
Your plane folds & flies away
Without us, I’ll make the next one
We are enclosed in spaceless epics by breathless bricks
& still we’ll meet like runes or the leashes for hawks
Let’s go! Can we stay? Go to sleep.
A tree wouldn’t talk or weep if I-forget-what
And you in the train’s opulent rooms
Switch your cock to a baby and then say
“Must there (not) be a law against this?”
You add, “I have been thinking of you in my head”
You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of
A tie, that’s how I recognize you as you
You are the prep cook the sous-chef you make
Duplicating potato salad like the loaves & fishes
You create gorgeous paper-like sculptures of foods
We go down in the car through threatening snows
To arrive in a second to eat in a renovated place
You and I tell “what” we are at the end of a movie
Our podium of soft loud feet flies by accident
I take the train to your house to hear Shakespeare & Verdi
Everyone applauds when you walk in. The director
Holds up each actor & describes his physical being
I talk to your father but only by telephone
You have the royal blue 8 � x 11 notebook with the lock on it
I want one but you say you cant get them anymore
I walk twice through that city I’ve been in before
All through its rooms, its streets and its Commons
Child of the Romans by Carl Sandburg
ReplyDeleteTHE dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by, and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,
And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day's work
Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils
Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases
Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.
at amazon.com it is asserted
Chicago Poems (1916) was Carl Sandburg's first-published book of verse. Written in the poet's unique, personal idiom, these poems embody a soulfulness, lyric grace, and a love of and compassion for the common man that earned Sandburg a reputation as a "poet of the people."
Among the dozens of poems in this collection are such well-known verses as "Chicago," "Fog," "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter," "Who Am I?" and "Under the Harvest Moon," as well as numerous others on themes of war, immigrant life, death, love, loneliness, and the beauty of nature. These early poems reveal the simplicity of style, honesty, and vision that characterized all of Sandburg's work and earned him enormous popularity in the 1920s and '30s and a Pulitzer prize in poetry in 1951.